Following his mid-life professional transition from semi-successful chef to rousingly successful author and global gadfly, Bourdain had an appeal that was inextricably linked to the impression he gave the audience that we knew him, that we were privy to his thoughts and reflections and, therefore, to something deeper and more personal.
Many of the people who actually knew Anthony Bourdain best are featured in Morgan Neville’s documentary Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival ahead of eventual theatrical, CNN and HBO Max availability.
This results in a film that will move you — definitely to sadness, perhaps to anger — and, if you’re like me, a film that doesn’t always feel like it should have been made at all, at least not at this moment and in this way.
At the same time, the compulsion is masked in a commitment that contributed directly to why audiences felt such a deep attachment to Bourdain — and just as directly to Neville’s ability to make a documentary that gives the impression of almost mind-boggling access to a man Neville never actually met.
The movie basically starts in 1999, with Bourdain on the cusp of the release of Kitchen Confidential, the book that would change his life.
Many of the people the documentary presents as being closest to Bourdain will already be familiar to dedicated fans, because they were also people Bourdain shared experiences with on his TV shows.
They’re the ones who got to watch first-hand how Bourdain grew from a food-centric guy with little global experience, willing to do sensationalistic things like eating a still-beating cobra heart, into a man whose focus became the people he met on his journeys and the opportunity to embed and immerse himself in places and conversations that moved him.